Freitag, 21. Dezember 2012

[...] normally those responsible for producing doctrine are colonels and their immediate assistants, military or civilian, working for their superiors, the generals. [...] The generals arrive at certain "conclusions". Next, it is up to the colonels to justify those conclusions and flesh them out. Though the generals themselves hardly ever write doctrine, invariably it is over their signatures that it is issued. In theory, the readership consists of officers of all ranks. The objective is to help them develop a common vision concerning the way their country's armed services understand their mission and go about carrying it out. In practice, doctrine, with its frequent elaboration of the obvious, its tendency to split hairs (as in trying to define the difference between air superiority and air supremacy), and dry, often very convoluted, language aimed at covering all possibilities, is hardly ever read by anybody at all.

Mittwoch, 12. September 2012

The Army and Marine Corps are developing procedures
that allow front-line troops to request offensivecyber
support the same way they currently request artillery and air support.

For its part, the Army has fielded the Cyber Effects Request Format, or CERF, a system tht allows
combatant commands to request cyber operations from U.S. Cyber Command.

"It's an Air Force model that we
deliberately seized on about 19 months ago, a close air support model, to
develop a process and procedures by which tactical and operational commanders
can leverage these fires in support of their operations," said Lt. Col. Jason
Bender, chief of fires for Army Cyber Command on August 15. ("Fires" is the
military term for discharging weapons.)
[...]
Requests for cyber fire support will go
up through the same chain of command as air or artillery support and will end
at cyber operators providing the solutions, according to Bender.

Right now, the CERF allows combatant
commanders and operational commanders to request cyber support for their
missions. However, the Army would like to expand this so that smaller, tactical
level units fighting on the ground can request cyber fire support.

"Just about all the services would like
to be able to [provide cyber fire support to tactical level troops], the
question right now is, what is a cyber tactical fire," said Bender during a
Sept. 7 interview. "Most of the fires that we're doing are at the operational
or strategic level of war." Since cyber operations don't have physical
boundaries, limiting the effects of cyber fires "to a small tactical area is
pretty difficult right now."

However, one of the biggest challenges
with providing cyber fire support is making sure that planners throughout the
military understand what cyber tools are available to them, how to use those
tools, as well as possible unintended effects of a cyber strike (similar to the
way military planners must work to avoid civilian casualties from airstrikes).
[...]
"With conventional weapons, it's very
easy to say ‘I've got a bridge and I want to deny road traffic or deny a line
of communication.' As a weaponeer, I can go look at that bridge, and I've got
all these weapons that are available to me and all I've got to do is put six
JDAMs [GPS-guided bombs] across the bridge or hit the pylons in a certain way
and I'm going to drop the bridge and I'm going to deny that line of
communication, that road going across the bridge," said Bender. "That's not
always so easy in cyberspace."

Commanders, versed in traditional
military weaponry and the effects of those weapons, must know what exactly they
want to do from a cyber perspective and understand all the collateral effects
of their actions and how they interplay between the cyber and physical domains,
according to Bender.

"Consider an unclassified network inside of a
ground force headquarters, and we have the ability to infiltrate that network
and disrupt their communications on it or do [misleading] message delivery. If
we destroy that headquarters building, we also destroy our [cyber]characteristics of the target, so that target ceases to
exist in cyberspace," potentially undermining a cyber mission, said Bender.
At the same time, cyber planners must be
aware of the needs of ground troops when planning cyber operations, Bender told
Killer Apps in a follow-up interview.

To this end, the Army is working to view
targets through a holistic lens that takes into account what impact kinetic
operations will have on cyber operations and vice versa. Why bomb an enemy into
submission when you can simply confuse him into ineptitude for a fraction of
the cost?